Kaveri desktop parts coming in January

AMD has confirmed what we knew all along. Although it might announce the first Kaveri products later this year, the first desktop parts will be available on January 14 2014. Although many were hoping to see the first Kaveri chips by the end of the year, having them just two weeks into 2014 doesn’t really make much of a difference.

So what can we expect from the first batch of Kaveri parts?

One part revealed during the APU 13 presentation was the A10-7850K. It appears to be a 3.7GHz quad-core with 512 Radeon cores (R7-series GPU). The theoretical performance calculated by AMD for this particular part is 856 GFLOPs.

However, the trouble with Kaveri is that we still don’t know the impact of HUMA, HSA and Mantle on actual real world performance. HUMA will let the chip share memory between the GPU and CPU, although GDDR5 support is lacking, shattering the wet dreams of many a fanboy. HSA and Mantle could unlock even more performance.

"Kaveri can perform well above its class because of these technologies," an AMD spokesman told EE Times.

So far AMD is confirming Mantle support in four upcoming games. Mantle could practically allow AMD APUs to do more with less silicon, boosting their price/performance ratio. Of course, more developers need to embrace Mantle in order to give new AMD APUs a competitive edge.